Dear the girl who stood at the threshold of every room, unsure whether to enter or vanish,

You learned early that some kinds of strength are heard before they’re seen. The sharp rhythm of high heels on cold tile announced her arrival like a warning. You measured love in decibels, not hugs or softness, but how loudly she moved through the world while you tried to keep your footsteps quiet. You thought her click-clacks were the sound of everything you weren’t: bold, certain, essential.

You kept asking: how can someone so close feel so far? How can someone speak of love and never be there to translate it? You searched for signs in her absence—an untouched lunch, a bruised silence at the table, the way she never asked what you wrote in your diary but always paid the school bill on time. You didn’t understand yet that love, too, is a language. And she spoke it in currencies you hadn’t yet learned to count.

You were praised for being quiet, for folding into corners, for not needing much. But when you were hurt and no one said his name, you learned that silence has a cost. You thought that shrinking yourself might protect you from the shame that wrapped around your skin like smoke. You mistook survival for erasure.

Still, you noticed things others didn’t. The way someone’s silence held more warmth than their words. The way strangers cried freely in Hanoi, or how the women in Mai Chau wove stories into threads. You wanted to tell your own stories but didn’t trust your voice to be enough. So you listened. You watched. You built quiet sanctuaries where people could speak without fear of echo. And without realizing it, you were redrawing the shape of what it means to be strong.

For a long time, you saw her as a country you could never cross. She was firm where you were fluid, certain where you were questioning. But one day, she showed up to something you built—not with critique, but curiosity. And in her pause, you saw it: she had been watching, quietly proud, in a language of sacrifice and distance. Her love had never been absent. It had just been unfamiliar.

You once believed there were only two kinds of people: those who speak and those who listen. Those who fight and those who feel. But now you know: you are a borderland. You are both protest and prayer. Both wound and witness.

If I could reach you then, the girl trying to be loud enough to matter, I would whisper: you were never too soft. You were seismic. You just moved in a different register.

And that’s the version of strength that saved you.

With everything you didn’t yet know,